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Zero-Shot Object Removal via Attention Masking, Latent Anchoring, and Refinement

2026-09-23 16:19:31
Arman Taghizadeh (Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabr\"uck University, Osnabr\"uck, Germany), Ulf Krumnack (Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabr\"uck University, Osnabr\"uck, Germany), Kai-Uwe K\"uhnberger (Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabr\"uck University, Osnabr\"uck, Germany)

Abstract

Removing an object from a real image requires more than synthesizing plausible content within a mask: the method must suppress residual object features, preserve the unedited scene, and generate replacement content that is consistent with the surrounding background. This paper approaches object removal from a stage-based perspective and proposes a zero-shot framework for constrained latent inpainting with a frozen pretrained Stable Diffusion model, requiring no task-specific training or model fine-tuning. The method integrates SAM-based mask construction, BLIP image-caption conditioning, DDIM inversion, background-weighted masked null-text optimization, decoder self-attention masking, hard outside-mask latent anchoring, and localized renoise--denoise refinement into a unified pipeline. The method is evaluated through qualitative examples, quantitative local-consistency metrics, and ablation studies. The results demonstrate effective object removal and context-consistent replacement content. The ablations indicate that background-weighted masked NTI is particularly beneficial for structurally complex backgrounds, whereas the no-NTI variant is sufficient in other evaluated examples. Repeated refinement further reduces object remnants and boundary artifacts remaining after the primary editing pass.

Abstract (translated)

URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28342

PDF

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.28342.pdf


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